


Perhaps the rains would come.

by virgil



Category: BattleTech: MechWarrior
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-15
Updated: 2019-04-15
Packaged: 2020-01-13 17:32:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18473725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/virgil/pseuds/virgil
Summary: Short thematic piece about an encounter on a backwater moon and a pilot.





	Perhaps the rains would come.

Perhaps the rains would come. Perhaps they would wash the great metal bodies clean of mud and grime and blood, bathe the wounds in water and the pilots would all come back.

Perhaps they would. Perhaps in a few more years. She thought about it often, in the seat of her Shadow Hawk, high on a ridge overlooking Triton-VII. This moon was nothing like home, but then again, what would ever be. She wasn’t home anymore. No one was, no one she could think of.

A buzz from a communicator shot through her thoughts. Movement to the south, something bigger than just the rat-cattle of the backwater farms of T7. Pirates, maybe. A lost crew of scavengers, or freelancers like herself. She pushed the throttle and began the stomp-stomp-stomp down the hillside, small clouds of dust and flashlight-beams cutting her path. The moon’s carnivorous rabbits, too small to know death on a planetary scale, fluttered underneath her mount’s feet.

The machine is never graceful, she knew that. It was not built for any dance other than the roughshod two-step of combat, the grime and the heat. She knew it, though, and she danced when she could, weaving through live fire. The emblazoned name on the cockpit’s exterior, Slow Steps, a reminder of what she was. What she did. A dancer, yes. A forward guard, a welcome committee within the orchestra of fire. The first to see enemy, the riskiest position.

She looked to the ridge ahead. Aye, visual confirmation. Aye, three of them. Locusts, ripped clean out the armholes, barely standing but marching forward, slight red tints on their forward lights. Behind them, more put-together but similarly showing signs of wear, a Dragon. Aye, it’s got missiles, she notes. She knows what this fight is, and it ain’t in her favor.

In her youth her father showed her how to shoot a gun. How the kick of the butt against your shoulder is a direct translation of the shot moving forward, a reminder that you are throwing forward material at speeds to kill. She remembered the rain, the smell of gunpowder at the range. The mechs on the horizon, also lights on and moving slow. She snapped back to the present. Too many ghosts in those memories.

Flicking a switch to her right, she primed Slow Steps for combat, activating missile systems, keeping an eye on heat trackers. She could take them in two, three volleys maximum. It had been a dry season on T7, the sand under her feet still warm to the touch. Perhaps the rains may not come this year. She had the advantage. She had her orders.

The pirate crew was hundreds of feet ahead. They showed no sign of recognizance. She tried radio again—asking permission this time, to engage. No answer.

The caravan limped forward. Perhaps each step a pushback, recoil dampeners damaged. Feeling every step in the pilot’s bones. She could see exposed wiring from here. Under the feet of Slow Steps, the curious rabbits gathered around their new neighbor. They were smarter here, the farmers had said. They fed on the dead, like vultures. They had learned that the smell of gunpowder meant a bounty, another few years of life in the desolate landscape. She squeezed the trigger.

And a chorus, always a chorus, of missiles loosed into the air—oh, wondrous things, each finding their target as if guided by divine machination. The contrails dripping from the landscape, the first Locust struggled, and fell, the second shot clean through. Her father had taught her how to kill clean. The Dragon turned, too late, and a newly crippled leg gave out, grounding the machine. Clean three. No kickback.

The rabbits underfoot swirled and ran, drove off by the cacophony. They would return much later and scrape the land for blood, and corpses. They would find three, stripped of tags and looted by her gang before dumped unceremoniously onto the land. The rabbits would tear into the bodies, sinew and bone alike, with teeth accustomed to stripping whatever was left and they would feast, carry some meats back to their burrows and come winter, when the rains came back and she had left, long gone, to another job on another backwater they would find the savannah clean again, the farmers gave up, the moon turned to just moon again for another fifty or so years.

But here tonight, there was this other thunder, this other storm, of the pilot and the machine and nothing much else. The quick screams and the slow pillaging afterward, as is all conquest and bloody work of human movement. And she would get paid, as would her crewmembers, and the moon would stay stable. And the savannah was dry, and the rains did not come. Not yet. Not yet.


End file.
